don't shy from the light (it'll never harm you)
by imperfectandchaotic
Summary: Part of Kai (the 'Luke' part) insists that Bonnie doesn't owe him anything, that even a shot at redemption in her eyes is more than he should be allowed in this new second life, but the larger, older parts of him did not grow up while he was frozen in time. There is a reason Malachai won the merge, after all. [a 6.17 character study, and the question, what next?]
1. this is just my soul responding

**Notes: **Hello I have like three other half-written fics in my notebook and this is the only one that will probably go beyond three pages, which means woo posting.

(no but really kai is so much more likeable as a more complex character I was super over the whole sociopath thing but this is way more interesting and it's about time bonnie had someone who could keep up with her amazingness and who has actual witch powers that can rival her own?)

(I also alternated between a scream of horror and one of joy because ship pain? but also girl power? I mean this show man. you totally lost me for a while there but I am back and mostly for these two because I called steroline literally four years ago and this is not how I imagined it going down so here is my shiny new painful ship)

(because what are all my ships if not painful and half-doomed?)

_***tl;dr**_ \- this first half is essentially just a character study from 6.17 - a characterization exercise if you will, and a kick in the ass because I want to write a second part but I'm having trouble actually deciding where I want to go? It's making starting difficult.

* * *

(one)

**|bb|**

Damon says, "We need Kai to get the ascendant from 1903," and his eyes are so pleading and so apologetic beneath his blasé attitude that Bonnie can almost forgive him for the ambush the other night.

Almost.

He says, "Stick with me, Bonnie Bennett," and then his grin is razor sharp, conniving and cruel; the mere fact that these two versions of Damon can exist at the same time is nearly unfathomable. But then again, spending months on end with only one person leads you to accept a lot about them, and Bonnie just doesn't have the time or energy to hate the man her best friend is eternally in love with — not when her other best friend has decided to be rid of all emotions **— **especially love — altogether.

Besides, even Bonnie can't deny that something grew between her and Damon in all that time and that not-enough space, something that made him the first person she wanted to truly see (to truly touch), and something that lets her draw on the warmth and emotion of that last voicemail, sometimes.

"I'm doing this for Caroline," she informs him, as if that needed any clarification. "And Stefan."

Damon just nods, somehow serious and sarcastic both at once, and hands over his phone.

—

Kai sounds too gleeful on the phone, over the fact that she is finally (however unwillingly) reaching out to him, and in person it's nealy too much to handle. As he dangles the ascendant in front of her like some kind of pet treat, Bonnie has half a mind to get up and leave him to his ridiculous self-satisfied smirk. The other half of course, is thinking of her friends.

"What's the catch?" she demands, because there is always a catch in conversations like these. Kai's confident teasing falls away, and everything in Bonnie tenses.

He says, "I'll go if you go," something so earnest in it even as his eyes are oddly guarded.

She wants to throw up.

Kai prattles on about 1903 and time travel and she is only half-kidding when she tells him, "I'd rather die of cholera than spend an afternoon with you."

He drops his gaze, like a flinch, and Bonnie is oddly and terribly satisfied.

|**kp**|

Using her best friend to convince her is as easy as he expects it to be; the voice he has dubbed 'stupid Luke' hums its disapproval.

Kai figures he should be worried, in the part of his brain still so wired for self-preservation and deceit, what with three people who hate him and an arguably complex and risky use of magic, but the sight of Bonnie's blood dripping onto the ascendant between them banishes the thought.

_You've done that to her._

It actually makes his stomach turn a little.

_Stupid empathy_, Kai thinks, before losing himself in the swirling rise of his magic (he will never be tired of _his_ magic) and the familiar (uncomfortable?) hum of Bonnie's life and power in his hands.

_She was dying, nearly, then._

Now she could probably take him, if she wanted to — if her hate was strong enough. Even Kai's quiet inner voice recognizes how deeply Bonnie could hurt him, if she truly tried.

—

Kai hasn't seen snow in nearly twenty years — not that he'd tell anyone that.

While he tilts his face up to the sky, he overhears the girls — "I don't want to leave you alone with him." Kai is tempted to grin out of sheer egotism.

"I'm fine," Bonnie says, and he feels a twinge somewhere in his chest. "He's good now, remember? New leaf."

He can tell without looking that Elena is dubious; Kai would be too — _good_ is a bit of a stretch.

Maybe that's a sign.

"New leaf?" he echoes, the stupid Luke voice making his sound stupidly eager and hopeful. "You believe me."

_Please please please—_

"Hell no."

The old parts of Kai — the original, the untainted with _feelings_ — probably would have lit a fire by now.

He can't decide if it's good or bad that he can't quite bring himself to do it.

Bonnie's scowl fades only a little as she relaxes and opens her hands for the locator spell; Kai is distracted once again by the dot of blood.

"You have really nice palms," he blurts, nearly unthinking.

The humiliation is quick; Bonnie just closes her eyes while Kai berates his stupid Luke voice for its idiocy. The spell takes invisible shape around them, and Kai is very aware suddenly of Bonnie's magic — powerful, graceful, terrifying — calling to his own, to that place in his chest, like a siren. Maybe that's what pulls the words out, pouring unchecked from the singular honest part of his soul.

Maybe he can do it now that she is concentrating on the spell, now that Kai, for a brief moment, doesn't have to struggle so much beneath the utter, scathing disdain and distrust in Bonnie's eyes.

"Do you know why I'm here?"

She ignores him (of course) but he presses on anyway. It's too late really; this is already happening. "Because my guilt keeps me up at night."

Stupid empathy.

Bonnie is still carrying on with the spell, as if she can't hear him (or just downright refuses) and Kai can pretend all he wants that it doesn't — doesn't _hurt_ — but now that he is fractured and put back together in mismatched pieces, all Kai wants is to be rid of this _feeling_ — of all of these feelings.

"I know — I know you don't believe me, but I need you to give me one more chance."

And...

nothing.

Part of Kai (the Luke part) insists that Bonnie doesn't owe him anything, that even a shot at redemption in her eyes is more than he should be allowed in this new second life, but the larger, older parts of him did not grow up while he was frozen in time.

There is a reason _Malachai_ won the merge, after all.

"Bonnie!" he shouts, "Listen to me!" He breaks her trance, grabbing at her arm—a deep-rooted place in him can feel his darkest magic surging up, and where he'd normally just _pull_, Kai can also feel Bonnie's own power bursting forward to meet his; the clash is like lightning beneath his skin.

Kai is used to pulling— _used to pulling Bonnie's magic right out_— and she knows it too, the expression in her eyes strong enough to recoil him and release her. She is trembling, nearly imperceptively.

"Sorry," he starts, something bitter (shame) coating his tongue and making him falter. "Oh my god, I— I didn't mean to do that." Kai's heart is beating too quickly.

"But you did it anyway." Bonnie's expression is almost as resigned as it is furious. _You wanted to hurt her_. "Because even if you're telling the truth, the old you is still inside of you."

She turns away before he has time to digest that terrible (_or not-so-terrible_) truth.

"The ascendant is this way."

Kai has to take a breath (why is his heart still beating so fast?) before he can follow.

—

He tries not to stare too hard at Bonnie's back, or at the way snow looks in her hair.

"If you don't think I'm capable of change, why spend an entire day with me?"

She seems determined to ignore this particular line of questioning; now he's determined to know. "Why bring me out in the middle of nowhere?"

Bonnie stops, and the Luke part of Kai warns that he should too, but the thought is already stuck in his throat. "I could gut you all over again."

Her shoulders go still.

"Your friends would never even hear you scream."

She turns and he stamps down the urge to lean away. "Because maybe you're right."

He doesn't feel particularly good about being right.

"Maybe deep down there's a part of me that believes there's a sliver of good in you."

Kai is surprised; there's something in her tone, in the way she's looking at him right now.

Maybe that's another sign.

**|bb|**

He laughs and she wants to throw up again.

Kai turns his back and as Bonnie pulls out her knife, a small part of her brain wonders how he can't be suspicious here now, in the middle of the forest where, like he said—

no one will hear him scream.

She plunges the knife into his back and the rush of having _finally_ been able to hurt him is almost frightening.

Not enough to stop her, though.

"Bonnie!" Kai turns over to face her, a kind of desperation in his face and all she can think is, _now you know how it feels_. "What are you doing?"

He oddly doesn't sound that panicked, not really, as if maybe some part of him had expected this all along. The thought just flares Bonnie's anger hotter.

"Gaining your trust," she spits, fury making the knife in her hand tremble, "and then stabbing you in the back! Feels pretty sucky, doesn't it?"

"Please don't—"

"Don't what? Don't leave you here? All alone? Drive you to the point of wanting to end your own life?" Her free hand smacks him nearly of its own volition. "I almost killed myself because of you!"

The utterance of that truth nearly pulls her all the way down again.

|**kp**|

He wonders if anyone told her what they'd tried to do, that day.

What _he'd_ tried to do.

Kai wonders (in a far off 'currently not about to be stabbed to death' part of his brain) if he'd be bleeding in the forest in 1903 if she knew.

But the new parts of him know that it would be selfish to tell her now.

It wouldn't change anything.

Even if he wishes it would.

**|bb|**

"Please believe me, I've _changed._"

"I know." Beneath Kai's pleading and the roar of in her ears, Bonnie is aware—almost separately?—of Kai's magic, immense and nearly as (or just as, or more) powerful than her own, and a voice in her head whispering, _he's letting you hurt him_.

But Bonnie doesn't care.

"So have I."

When she hits nothing, deep down she isn't surprised at all.

|**kp**|

Kai's magic carries him further than he thought possible, until he collapses onto his back to stare at the endlessly grey sky.

_She tried to kill you._

Even Kai the sadist is having trouble handling that one.

It takes him a long time to get up; by the time he manages it, Kai is damp with snow and dizzy with blood loss.

His vulnerable state—the softness of his heart and the fragility of his bones—has never troubled him, until now.

Kai is magic — even the awful (_abomination_) before of him was magic, even if it was of the darkest kind.

His magic will keep him alive.

If he lets it.

Kai wanders back, following the trail of their footprints (wonders if Bonnie is scared sometimes in the same way he is now, because their hearts pulse in a way their—her vampire friends' hearts do not, despite their birthrights and skills and hours upon hours of learning and growing—he wants to ask, but knows deep down he never will) and only hopes that stabbing him was enough—

that she won't actually leave him here.

Above, the aurora blazes, lighting his way.

Kai knows, even before he breaks the final line of trees, that he's too late.

Her magic is calling; he could follow it anywhere.

**|bb|**

"I just want you to be sure," Elena says, even as she holds out the ascendant to receive Bonnie's offering. "Will this give you what you need?"

His magic will keep him alive, if he lets it.

He'll survive. He'll be trapped.

That's all she wants.

Bonnie looks her best friend in the eye.

"Yes."

|**kp**|

"Bonnie!"

She sees him, but as the darkness in his heart can see darkness in hers, Kai knows she won't wait.

He wishes he'd imagined that curve of her mouth.

They disppear in a flash of light and the Luke part of him whispers, _you deserve it._

_She'll never forgive you._

_You're alone again._

**|bb|**

Kai is gone.

Bonnie tells Damon it's closure, and it is, in a way.

But she will carry that scar until the day she dies.

And she can't shake this feeling that it isn't over yet.

* * *

**More Notes:** I am all for those terrible longing looks and the path of most resistance.

here. for. it.

(part two to come within the next few days? maybe? at some point this week for sure. spring break is only so long – then back to work. sigh)

thoughts are loved!

Annie


	2. i'll use you as a focal point

**Notes: **so as I was a few sections from the end, I realized that this fic has sort of been done a lot already – so I promise that I am not plagarizing or stealing, that we all sort of had similar ideas, but that I have actually been writing this over the past week before I saw anything else.

so awkward.

* * *

(two)

**|bb|**

They have to go back.

_Of course_ they have to go back.

"You owe me so bad for this, you know."

Damon has the decency to look chagrined, beneath the blood loss. "Sorry, Bon-Bon. You know how tempermental vampire mothers are."

"Don't you lump your crazy mother in with mine," she tells him, oddly amused despite the fact they are in mortal danger again. "You realize this is all your fault."

"Thanks for the reminder."

"Alright guys, alright." Elena, ever the placator, hands Damon a blood bag and Bonnie the ascendant, respectively.

She shoves her boyfriend back into the couch with one hand, while offering a scarf to her best friend with the other. Despite the carnage of the day and the fact that the Salvatore living room is covered in Damon's blood, Elena somehow manages to not have a single hair out of place.

Sometimes Bonnie hates her.

"Are you sure you don't want me to come with you?" Elena frowns as Bonnie opens her hand (how many times has she done this? shouldn't she have a permanent scar?) and lets her blood drip onto the ascendant. "How are you going to get all those vampires back without help?"

Bonnie opens her mouth to respond, but Damon jumps in instead.

"That's what the sociopath we stuck back there is for. He's basically in love with her already – shouldn't be too hard to convince him."

"You are such an ass, you know that?" The witch glares over Elena's shoulder, to which the vampire responds with a snarky grin and a wave.

"All part of my charm, Miss Bennett."

"Just be careful," Elena says, wrapping her own fingers around Bonnie's and squeezing. "Be fast, if you can, but be careful. There's no telling what those vampires are really like."

"Don't forget Kai," Bonnie reminds her bitingly. "I don't think he'll be too happy to see me, considering I stabbed him last time we saw each other."

"Well," Elena says, her lips twitching in a terrible attempt at a smile, "You're his ticket back. I know—" She stops, a seriousness descending on her expression. "I know it's not what you wanted. But he's the coven leader. If he died, that'd be another disaster to deal with."

"Just what the egomaniac needs," Damon quips.

"That's funny," Bonnie retorts, feeling an odd urge to laugh, in spite of everything. "coming from you."

Damon says something else, but Bonnie has already started the spell; the rise of her magic drowns him out.

When she opens her eyes again, everything is white.

**|kp|**

The pain is so bad that Kai thinks he's imagining this feeling in his chest—the one he always gets around Bonnie's magic.

It's been over a week.

He's given up.

He's accepted his fate.

So why won't his chest stop _aching_?

Kai is sure the Luke part of his brain is malfunctioning; desperation and derision are at war inside his head—though maybe that's the blood loss talking. Surely she hasn't come back.

She tried to kill him.

Kai figures he could spend the next several decades debating; he limps to the frigid wooden slates of the shed door and peers out. He's aware suddenly that he's speaking, low and half-muttered, as if the lighter half of him took control of his voice.

_"Please please please please..."_

The aurora trembles as if in response, throwing eerie shadows and light through the door.

Kai wonders if this is what prayers sound like.

He may have been imagining the feeling, but the bright flash of white is unmistakable.

**|bb|**

Of course the ascendant couldn't just take her back to the same spot.

Bonnie pulls the edges of the scarf in closer against the bitter cold, straining her eyes against the dark and the blaze of the aurora in the sky. Back again in prison 1903, she counts the tiny blessing that the weater on the day of a solar eclipse in 1994 is, by all acounts, a million times better than this. She can't imagine having to endure this particular torment forever.

Bonnie thinks of Kai then, an unbidden flash of his downcast eyes, and a feeling she refuses to acknowlege presses in her gut.

She can see the Salvatore house in the distance; Bonnie focuses on walking and banishes anything else.

—

It's too quiet.

Bonnie had even remembered Elena's instruction and found the cave where, to her near unsurprise, there isn't a single dessicated vampire to be found.

There is blood, though.

Trepidation pinching at her spine, Bonnie carefully makes her way back towards the house. The door even creaks as she enters, but even as she freezes, there isn't a sound. Lights warms the first hall; there are dark whorls in the wood of the floor—and more blood.

"Hello?" she breathes, wincing a little even as she says it; her voice seems to echo everywhere. Bonnie closes the door, but that's as far as she gets before there is a hand over her mouth and a familiar voice (_"invisque"_) _— her magic is overcome in a crash of unseen lightning; she is vulnerable — _and a pull in the pit of her stomach—they are moving, and when it stops, Bonnie is pressed against a bedroom wall and Kai Parker's eyes are holding hers.

"Don't scream, okay?" he whispers, though even that seems to require effort; even beneath the twist of anger, Bonnie can see that he looks awful—pale and trembling and plastered in half-dried blood. "I don't think the spell's going to hold up very well."

All she can do for the moment is stare. Bonnie is fiercely aware of Kai and his closeness, firm in the knowledge that despite the faint pressure of the cloaking spell in the air, his hand over her mouth is precisely the only place that Kai is currently touching her; she could break free easily, if she wanted to. Judging by the look in his eyes, Kai knows what she's thinking.

"We have to be—" he inhales roughly, though his hand leaving her mouth is oddly gentle. "—quiet. I'm not..." Kai's lips twitch in a kind of self-depricating smile as he backs away from Bonnie. "I'm not exactly at a hundred percent."

She watches him stumble backwards to the bed, sinking down and looking more weary than she's ever seen him.

"I'm not hallucinating you again, am I?" he asks, something small in his voice even as he half-grins at her. "You're really back."

"You look like hell." It's the first thing that she comes up with that isn't in response to,_ hallucinating you._ 'What happened,' is on the tip of her tongue, before Bonnie bites it back.

_You stabbed him._

Kai's eyes are knowing again.

"The vampires," he says, cutting through that unacknowledged feeling. "Do the Salvatores always come with some kind of entourage?"

"But they're..." Even as she says it, Bonnie knows it's clearly not true; Kai has turned his head and she can see the familiar mark. "Dessicated."

"Not so much anymore." Kai makes a sort of 'what can you do' gesture before wincing. "I'm honestly surprised I'm even alive right now."

He coughs, his entire body shaking with the force of it, before crimson splashes down onto the floor.

"Maybe I spoke too soon." The leader of the Gemini coven looks, for maybe the first time since Bonnie's met him, very young. "I uh, I don't know any healing spells." (_sociopath, she thinks viciously_) "I think—" Kai drags a hand at his mouth, flashing her a pained smile. "I think my magic's just strong enough to hold me together, but those guys are still hungry. I've been hiding for days."

He lifts his eyes to meet Bonnie's. Since you left me here. It's there — in the shadow behind his eyes, in this weight in the air — but Bonnie refuses still to bow down to the emotion taking root in her chest and Kai, in some strange display of grace, doesn't give it voice.

"Bonnie," he says softly, but the sound of her name in his mouth still jerks through her like a gunshot. "What are you doing here?"

It's a fair question.

"Lily. Mrs. Salvatore," she says, when his forehead creases. "She's threatening the town. If I didn't bring back her friends, she's going to start killing. Damon tried to stop her, but..." Bonnie doesn't finish the sentence, because it's clear what happened next.

There is a beat of silence; Kai's eyes flick to hers and away again, his expression closed before he asks, "Don't they know you can't transport that many people by yourself?" He frowns at the floor. "It would kill you."

She can't tell if he's deliberately being obtuse, or if he genuinely doesn't get it._ Or maybe,_ whispers some traitorous part of her, _he's just thinking of you._ Bonnie finds it oddly difficult to look at him.

"That's why you're coming back with us."

Kai lifts his head, that same something small from before in his gaze, but Bonnie doesn't want to give it a name.

Kai Parker isn't vulnerable.

**|kp|**

He's pretty sure the name of this feeling in his throat — the one that's making it hard to speak — is _gratitude_, but Kai isn't sure and he doesn't want to ask Bonnie about it, because _'you're a sociopath_' isn't exactly a conversation one forgets.

But he should say _something_, shouldn't he?

"Thank you," he manages at last, not even sure what he's thanking her for **— **_thank you for coming back, thank you for offering to heal me, thank you for not abandoning me for all eternity, thank you for not setting me on fire when I sort of kidnapped you again._

He lifts his chin a little higher and tries to catch Bonnie's eye, but she seems determined to avoid him in any way she can.

Kai has to try very hard not to feel anything over it. Stupid Luke.

"Don't thank me yet," she says, like a warning, like accepting this fragile social nicety is the absolute last thing she wants to do. "There isn't a lot of use for practicing healing magic when all of your friends are already equipped."

He tries to smile encouragingly, sincerely. "I trust you."

There is a flash of something across her face, something so visceral and sharp that Kai nearly flinches away from it. He presses his lips together, as if that would stop the Luke part of his brain from saying yet more stupid things. Bonnie moves closer, a downturn to her mouth like he is any manner of unpleasant thing she must deal with, and Kai musters his energy into looking as calm and non-threatening as he knows how.

Her passage across the room seems to take forever, but then she is sitting precariously on the edge of the bed, and the only thing Kai's brain can focus on is the knowledge that Bonnie is the last person he has touched in however many days he has been trapped here, weak and alone.

Well, save for the bloodthirsty vampires, that is.

"Just the one bite?" she asks, reaching out and tilting his head so she can scrutinize the developing scar. A pause. "And your back?"

He has to remind himself to breathe, swallowing carefully.

"They were uh, all really precise."

Bonnie's eyes widen, but thankfully she doesn't voice the question aloud. Being eaten from four consecutive times is pretty much unheard of for the leader of a centuries old coven of witches, a fact of which Kai is only too-well aware.

Not to mention the fact that he nearly died.

And all that is after being _literally stabbed in the back._

It's just sort of humiliating all around.

"I think I twisted my ankle, getting away."

Bonnie nods. "This shouldn't hurt," she says, laying her hand almost clinically against the curve of his jaw and throat, her smallest finger just barely touching the place where his heart pulses. Kai looks at Bonnie, who still isn't looking at him, but instead at the carnage of his throat.

He finds himself wishing, more than anything, that she actually wanted to be doing this right now.

That she actually cared.

That she'd actually just look at him.

"_Phosmatos curandi dolor_," Bonnie intones, and the small candle he'd been able find yesterday flares bright. The threads of the spell weave around them, warm and calming and beneath the now familiar edges of Bonnie's magic, Kai feels safe.

He wishes, before the soothing dark pulls him under, that he were brave enough to tell her.

**|bb|**

He's been in and out ever since she started the spell; "_Relax_," she'd had to snap, as he **— **or maybe his magic **— **strained against the bonds of her spell that kept him still and his heart slow. She has to resist the urge to smack him with the hand she still has on his face. Kai's eyes are startled beneath the encroaching fever and she nearly feels—

"You have to relax," Bonnie says, mustering calm. "Or this will never work."

He seems keen on looking at her, though she can't fathom why, but Kai sinks further into the pillows without a word. Bonnie, in turn, sinks back into the flow of the magic.

It's quiet for a while, until he speaks again, slow and lethargic. "How's Caroline? Still eating co-eds?"

"Unfortunately," Bonnie replies, nearly absently. She frowns at him. "What are you doing?"

There is a familiar amusement in his gaze; her stomach turns involuntarily. "Making conversation?"

"Well, stop it."

Kai's jaw clenches — that is familiar too, though the flex of muscle and rough stubble beneath her palm is not — but he doesn't challenge her.

—

Kai Parker talks in his sleep.

He is all but dead to the world, seemingly deep asleep but for the words she keeps catching as he tosses and turns, still too pale. The spell, still working even though Bonnie's let go of Kai, places the beat of his heart in the forefront of her mind; it is erratic and unnerving.

"-m sorry Dad, please don't leave me here I'm sorry I'll be good—"

"I'm gonna be an uncle—Josette you're so beautiful."

"I shouldn't have done it—I'm sorry."

Kai's eyes eyes fly open; Bonnie wonders how one can feel seen and unseen both at once.

"Do you think she'll ever forgive me?"

Somewhere deep down she has to wonder if they're really talking about Jo anymore.

"I don't know," Bonnie says, unsure still who or what they're really talking about, if Kai can even really hear her. But it's the truth if she had to choose one.

She reaches out and shifts his chin to see the bite; gone. He makes a soft noise, closing his eyes again, and Bonnie is too stunned to move right away when Kai leans into her hand, chasing her touch. In fact, she just freezes, staring as his heartbeat returns to something normal, something steady and even and strong.

_You have really nice palms._

She still has no idea what to do with that.

By some miracle, Bonnis is able to pull her hand away; Kai doesn't stir again.

He sleeps until the candle nearly burns itself out.

* * *

**More Notes: **there was going to be more – I had a whole confrontation/fight planned with the vamps, but I couldn't wrap my head around the actual logistics, so I'm gonna save it for the next chapter, I guess?

Wow I haven't written a chaptered fic in a long time.

bear with me please - I go back to work on Tuesday and I doubt I'll have a lot of time to write, but I'm going to try really hard to be done with...well whatever this fic is turning out to be, before the hiatus is over.

Thoughts are loved!

Annie


End file.
